


Like Poetry

by pixieface



Category: Swordspoint - Kushner
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-24
Updated: 2009-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-05 04:47:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/37959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pixieface/pseuds/pixieface
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alec and Richard on the island. Wing!fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like Poetry

**i.**  
Alec would never admit it, but he loved the way that Richard moved, even now that he was blind. It was not so much that he was graceful, insamuch as a swordsman necessarily attains grace, as it was that he moved with a smooth economy of motion, nothing wasted.

Alec hated unnecessary frills.

**ii.**  
The island was good for Alec, Richard could tell. His edges had not smoothed, and he was as vitriolic as ever, but in a place as small and beautiful as this, there was less to be vitriolic about. Of course he opined that the village was small and crude and its people were naught but savages, but that was only Alec. Richard never took it to heart.

What he did take was the gradual softening in the force behind the blade of Alec's remarks. Perhaps, Richard thinks, the prettiness of their new home does not let Alec spawn as much acid as he used to; just enough that he could spit it out upon the sand, and have it eat away at him no more.

**iii.**  
The times when Alec can coax Richard down onto the shoreline, on nights when the bonfire blazes high and the natives dance merrily and imbibe freely, are the best ones, he thinks. Alec is a lush, a Hill-bred brat with pet vices, and of this he is not ashamed.

He may, possibly, be ashamed of the offers to dance he turns down during these nights. Instead, he sits with his cup at the fringes of the gathering, watching as some local girl or another carefully leads Richard around the circumference of the flame.

If Alec cannot watch Richard kill, he can at least watch Richard dance.

**iv.**  
Richard wakes slowly, eyes stinging still from gouts of last night's smoke. Alec is twined around him, and Richard can feel the blankets bunched up oddly around them. This is strange; Richard drank hardly at all in comparison to Alec, and he has a clear memory of Alec stripping their bed in a fit of drunken pique. Today, Richard decides he does not care, and drifts slowly back into sleep.

He only realizes something is wrong when Alec hurriedly extricates himself sometime later, waking Richard again, and walking out of the room with an extra heaviness to his step. Richard gets up to follow him, and nearly trips on a corner of bedding by the door, where it shouldn't have been.

**v.**  
In the end, the healer can cure him.

"Wings," Alec mutters furiously, rubbing his thin fingers where they used to sprout. "I can't believe the manifestation of my inner self was wings, the council would never let me live it down."

Richard thinks he understands, though. Slowly, Alec is using his wings (metaphorically this time) to rise above it all.

**Author's Note:**

> For my buddy flamintwilight [over on eljay](http://flamintwilight.livejournal.com/), who likes Alec and likes wings. (My Alec voice is kind of nonexistent; concrit welcome.)


End file.
